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’90s Angst Bobbing to Dubstep Beats

Korn's members, from left, Reginald Arvizu, James Shaffer, Jonathan Davis and Ray Luzier.Credit
Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

DULUTH, Ga.

AT 1 a.m. on a Saturday night last month Jonathan Davis, the frontman of Korn, sat on his tour bus outside of Wild Bill’s, a bunkerlike nightclub in this Atlanta suburb where his band had finished performing an hour earlier. With him on the bus were five fans who had each paid close to $350 for a V.I.P. concert package that included the opportunity to listen with Mr. Davis to material from Korn’s new album, “The Path of Totality.” The album is a collaboration between this band, which helped define nu metal in the mid-1990s, and several producers — including Skrillex, Excision and Downlink — who specialize in the clattering, bass-heavy dance music known as dubstep.

Mr. Davis, 40, sat behind a silver laptop, wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the name of one of the dubstep D.J.’s who had opened for Korn that night, Datsik. As he played the new Korn song “Bleeding Out” — which fuses the loud, grinding guitars and angst-filled vocals that have been a staple of Korn’s music since its early-’90s inception with frenetic beats, wobbling bass lines, whooshes of synthesizer and screeching electronic effects — he sang along to his own vocals, bouncing in his seat enthusiastically. The fans all bobbed their heads quietly, and when the song finished, one of them clapped.

This is Korn’s challenge, in miniature. The band has sold nearly 20 million albums in the United States alone, but recently its commercial fortunes have dipped. Its 2010 album, “Korn III: Remember Who You Are,” sold only 185,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. As the band regrouped to record this year, Mr. Davis felt as if he needed to shake things up.

“Rock ’n’ roll’s been boring for a long time,” he said, shortly after the fans left the bus. “I’ve always been into electronic music, but it’s been blowing up. I thought this was the future.”

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Jonathan Davis at Wild Bill's nightclub in Georgia.Credit
Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

The band’s guitarist James Shaffer, who goes by the name Munky, saw the logic of Mr. Davis’s idea. “The characteristics between dubstep and what we do is very similar,” he said backstage before the show. “Our influences come from hip-hop. The low bass stuff is something we’ve been trying to accomplish ever since the band started.”

Dubstep is having its moment in America. While electronic dance music has long been a commercial force in Europe, the United States notoriously has been resistant to its charms. In the late ’90s many in the music media hyped an imminent “electronica” invasion from Britain, but it mostly failed to take root despite modest successes for acts like the Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim.

This time interest in electronic dance music, and particularly dubstep, has grown more organically, through raves, D.J. tours and especially the Internet. It has become a live-music juggernaut: This year’s Electric Daisy Carnival, a three-day electronic music festival in Las Vegas, featuring dubstep stars like Skrillex, Rusko and Datsik, drew 230,000 people. The similarly inclined Ultra Music Festival in Miami drew 150,000. (By comparison Bonnaroo and Coachella attracted about 80,000 each.) Enthusiasm isn’t confined to major metropolitan areas. Skrillex headlined a tour this fall of clubs and theaters, with capacities of 1,000 to 4,000, that included stops in Syracuse; El Paso; Lawrence, Kan.; and Spokane, Wash.

Korn is one of many mainstream rock, pop and hip-hop acts exploring dubstep. Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne, Rihanna, Britney Spears and J. Cole have all worked dubstep-flavored beats and sounds into recent tracks. Jay-Z and Kanye West built “Who Gon Stop Me?,” from this summer’s “Watch the Throne,” around a sample from the British dubstep D.J. Flux Pavilion. Skrillex has created dubstep remixes for Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and the Black Eyed Peas; this year he collaborated with the surviving members of the Doors for “Breakn’ a Sweat,” the first track the band worked on together in 30 years.

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The dubstep producer Skrillex.Credit
C Flanigan/Getty Images

Even Justin Bieber recently revealed that he’s experimenting with dubstep for his next album.

“Dubstep is the new punk, the new metal, the new rock; it’s what kids are fiending for,” said Saul Milton of the British duo Chase & Status, who have produced, remixed or collaborated on dubstep-leaning tracks by Snoop Dogg, Rihanna, Jay-Z and Cee Lo Green. “The tempo is great for rappers and singers. You’ve got a lot of space in the drums, which allows for vocals and crazy bass noises.”

Dubstep dates to the early 2000s in Britain. The word is an amalgamation of dub, as in Jamaican dub reggae, and 2-step, an underground electronic music subgenre that emphasizes unconventional dance beats. Early dubstep tracks by Skream and Burial were generally atmospheric and nuanced, but as the genre has grown in popularity, particularly in North America, it has transformed into a noisy, aggressive, testosterone-heavy spectacle that detractors refer to pejoratively as bro-step. Skrillex, who was born Sonny Moore, has become, fairly or unfairly, the face of bro-step, and dubstep purists see his work with Korn as the culmination of the genre’s bigger-is-better trend.

Skrillex, who was recently nominated for five Grammys, collaborated with Korn on three tracks for “The Path of Totality,” including the first single, “Get Up.” He said he is accustomed to seeing the comment section below his YouTube videos become a forum for naysayers to express their profanity-laced disapproval. “You could have 200 pages of people ripping something apart, then I can drop ‘Get Up!’ at Electric Daisy Carnival in front of 100,000 people, and every single person will go off on it,” he said.

Korn’s own fans have been skeptical of its new direction. One typical comment on the popular metal Web site Blabbermouth, which is maintained by Korn’s label, Roadrunner Records, summed it up thus: “Alienate most of your current or past fans. Just to jump on a new bandwagon. I call sell out!”

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A crowd surfer at Korn's concert in Duluth, Ga., last month.Credit
Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

Mr. Davis said: “A lot of people say I was doing this to jump on the bandwagon, but I’ve been a huge dubstep fan for years. I could retire easily right now, but we love challenging ourselves. My main focus is to attract the electronic crowd because they’re more open-minded.”

That Korn’s new path emerged at a moment that seemed a creative and commercial ebb for the band and a pinnacle for dubstep certainly invites charges of opportunism, but these charges say as much about the conservativeness of rock and metal as it does about Korn itself. When the popular metal band Five Finger Death Punch issued a bonus CD of dubstep-influenced remixes with the deluxe edition of its 2011 album, “American Capitalist,” the reaction was similarly polarizing, the band’s guitarist Zoltan Bathory said.

“Hardcore fans reject anything that changes the band’s sound so they hated it,” he said. “Metal fans are generally purists. If you look at metal from the ’80s and today, fundamentally it’s the same four instruments, guitar, bass, drums, vocals. If you use electronic influences, especially influences that are the flavor of the year, fans look at this as changing the very fundamentals of the genre.”

In late October a link to the Doors’ collaboration with Skrillex was posted to the band’s Facebook page. The negative reactions outnumbered positive ones by at least six to one.

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The Electric Daisy Carnival, a three-day electronic music festival in Las Vegas, drew 230,000 people and artists like Skrillex.Credit
C Flanigan/Getty Images

“Any time you do anything different, Doors fans are upset,” said the Doors keyboardist, Ray Manzarek. He noted that the band was criticized for its 1969 album, “The Soft Parade,” because it used horns and strings. “You can’t touch the Doors,” he added. “There’s a sacredness about Jim Morrison, especially now that he’s dead. But we’re open to all avenues of life. Working with Skrillex is just another avenue.”

Pop and hip-hop fans seem significantly less concerned about dubstep’s creeping influence. That performers like Rihanna, Britney Spears, Jay-Z and Kanye West are incorporating the hottest new sounds is generally seen as a virtue not a crime. In pop and hip-hop, stagnation equals death. Verse Simmonds, a co-producer of “Who Gon Stop Me?” from “Watch the Throne,” said he had learned about dubstep just weeks before working on the song.

“It’s that new wave everybody is really moving to right now,” he said. “I think it could be something fresh and new that’s in hip-hop for a while.”

The criticism of Korn’s turn to dubstep notwithstanding, some fans are clearly being won over. “Get Up!” has sold more than 200,000 digital downloads. During a five-song stretch devoted to “The Path of Totality” at the band’s concert at Wild Bill’s the energy hardly flagged, even though the audience had never heard much of the material. The monstrous bass drops and squawking beats in songs like “My Wall” and “Kill Mercy Within” didn’t feel at all out of place amid Korn’s punishing, down-tuned riffs and swaggering rhythms. Mosh pits materialized in front of the stage.

Some Korn fans will still see “The Path of Totality” as a betrayal of its roots, and dubstep diehards will undoubtedly blanch at Korn — or Rihanna or Justin Bieber — co-opting the music. Yet if history is a guide, the music will continue to evolve despite the concerns of either camp.

“In a year’s time the hype may die down, but that doesn’t mean dubstep will go anywhere,” Mr. Milton said. “Right now in America you’ve got kids wide-eyed excited, trying to find the next rave. This is just the beginning.”

Correction: December 25, 2011

An article on Dec. 11 about the heavy-metal band Korn and its incorporating dubstep, a kind of electronic dance music, into its sound misspelled the surname of the band’s guitarist who is known as Munky. He is James Shaffer, not Schaffer.

A version of this article appears in print on December 11, 2011, on Page AR20 of the New York edition with the headline: ’90s Angst Bobbing to Dubstep Beats. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe